Since the specific objectives of replacing the Halon fire extinguishing agent were proposed to member countries by The Canada Montreal Convention in 1987, all the countries of the world dedicated to the research of a new fire extinguishing technology; people make great efforts to research a fire extinguishing technology which has high fire extinguishing efficiency without any environment pollution.
The gas fire extinguishing systems, the powder fire extinguishing systems, the water type fire extinguishing systems and the like, which are environmentally friendly, are widely used as substitutes of the Halon fire extinguishing agent. The fire extinguishing mechanism of an inert gas fire extinguishing system, such as carbon dioxide, IG541 and the like, is mainly physical extinguishing, namely, a smothering extinguishing by reducing the oxygen concentration of a fire area. Such fire extinguishing method would threat the personal safety of workers. The powder fire extinguishing system implements fire extinguishing by the process that the powder spraying under the effect of pressurized gas contacts with the flame to generate the physical and chemical inhibition effect. The water spraying fire extinguishing system achieves the purpose of controlling the fire, inhibiting the fire and extinguishing the fire under triple functions of the water mist: cooling, smothering and isolating thermal radiation.
However, these fire extinguishing systems need to be stored under high pressure, not only the volume of these systems are larger, but also the risks of physical explosion during the storage process are higher; the document “The Security Analysis of Gas Fire extinguishing System” (Fire Science and Technology 2002 21 (5)) analyzes the risks of the gas fire extinguishing system, and enumerates the safety accidents of the storage pressure gas fire extinguishing system.
According to the research data, many foreign researchers carried out a large number of fire extinguishing substance researches, the Next Generation Fire Extinguishing Technology Project Group (NGP) of the Building and Fire Research Centre of the U.S. National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) publishes a lot of articles on this field. The group has researched the fire extinguishing capacity of the testing substances by making the testing substances act on the flame with carrier gas. The nitrogen, carbon dioxide or CF3H gas were used as carrier gas and the testing substances were heated by the carrier gases with high temperature. Wherein, some substances (such as the ferrocene) can sublimate under the effect of high temperature gas, and then can generate fire extinguishing substances which can obviously improve the fire extinguishing effectiveness of the carrier gas (Proceeding of the Combustion Institute, Volume 28, 2000/pp. 2965-2972, Flame inhibition by ferrocene and blends of inert and catalytic agents, Halon Options Technical Working Conference 2-4 May 2000, Flame inhibition by ferrocene, alone and with CO2 and CF3H).
In addition, the domestic Henan Polytechnic University published an article about sublimation and fire extinguishing of ferrocene and, a patent CN101327364A, namely, a ferrocene fire extinguishing test system.
However, the above researches are all based on the laboratory theoretical research merely, without being practically applied in fire extinguishers; meanwhile, the current research result shows that only the ferrocene can generate the fire extinguishing substances when it sublimates at high temperature, and other substances are not mentioned.
The existing aerosol fire extinguishing agent mainly includes the S type and K type fire extinguishing agents, by comprehensively analyzing the performance characteristics of the existing aerosol fire extinguishing agent, the disadvantages are mainly as follows: all the existing aerosol fire extinguishing agents release a large amount of gas and active particles during oxidation-reduction reaction, and achieve the chemical-physical synergetic fire extinguishing purpose through the chain scission reaction of the active particles and the coverage smothering of the large amount of gas. The aerosol fire extinguishing agent can release a large amount of heat while releasing the aerosol during the combustion reaction. In order to effectively decrease the temperature of device and aerosol, and to avoid the secondary fire, a cooling system needs to be mounted, which causes defects of complicated and heavy device structure, complicated technical process and high cost. Otherwise, a large number of active particles are inactivated as the existing of cooling system, and the fire extinguishing performance is greatly reduced.